How to solve system program problem detected on ubuntu

Almost immediately after a reboot i would get a few error dialogs containing the message system program problem detected, with the only available options being "cancel" and "Report problem...".

I got this on one of my machines running Ubuntu. It turns out that the reason why this popup occurs, is that Ubuntu has its own error reporting system called apport, similar to that which can be found in Microsoft Windows. Whenever an error occurs with a program, a report will be saved, and apport will then attempt to forward it to the developers.

In my case it came after attempting to set file permissions from nautilus, which caused nautilus to crash. A bug report was saved to /var/crash/, and every time i rebooted the system, it would prompt me to send the report.

Delete the pending bug report

One way to remove system program problem detected messages is to simply delete pending bug reports from the /var/crash/ directory, removing it can be done using the rm command from the terminal. I.e.:

sudo rm /var/crash/*

Now, after rebooting you should not get anymore notifications about pending bug reports.

How to disable error reporting in Ubuntu

Another way to stop these annoying popups, is to disable Ubuntus error reporting system. This can be done by opening the settings file of apport, and changing the enabled variable from "1" to "0". The file is located in /etc/default/, and can easily be opened from the terminal with the following command.